United Way releases yearly 'ALICE' report tracking poverty in Oregon

The ALICE report focuses on Oregonians who are struggling to feed their families and pay for basic needs.

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United way tracks the number of people who are working, but unable to afford basic necessities of housing, food, child, and health care.

The report is called alice and dan everson is with united way of jackson county.

She is the ceo there actually aren't you being with us today.

Thanks so much for having me, brian.

So tell us a little bit about this alice report, what it is and why it's a valuable tool.

This is a really great tool to take a looook at families in our community who live either in poverty or in survival buckets, which is really like the working group.

Yeah.

So alice has an acronym for what asset limited income constrained employed.

So it really means people who have jobs who are barely getting by.

So given the alis figures, what does it take for a family of four to get by in jackson county right now for a family of four with kids in childcare, which adds a lot of expense.

Uh, the annual need is $73,000 a year.

So we have a high percentage, 34% of our population who lives in that category.

Uh, and if you have school aged children, that annual budget drops to $62,000 a year, so you're going to see the impact of the cost of just childcare alone on a family's budget.

So what can your agency do to help folks who are in that position between having a work and be able to afford the necessities?

I think we can see through the covid-19 pandemic that a lot of nonprofits rally to be able to help families in our community.

We could come out of this learning a great deal about how to really affect change for these families.

Uh, income supports are really important, ensuring they have adequate food.

If they can't afford a food budget, transportation is a huge issue.

And, and so you have to be able to, uh, either have it yourself or be able to afford the bus pass to get you around.

So, uh, there are a great deal of us in this community doing a lot of work, uh, to help our families survive.

It sounds like you're, you're doing great work, helping those sort of patch and bandaid the issues.

Is there a longer term solution?

And if so, what might that be?

Well, i think there's no question that, uh, we have to have sustainable jobs that pay families to be able to survive.

We do that through a variety of ways.

And right now our business sector is suffering greatly.

And so prior to that, when these, this data was gathered, uh, we have to make sure that families are making wages that can, uh, allow them to live above the poverty line or the survival budget line.

What do you see for the childcare specific, uh, problem given that that certainly hits.

Been hit that industry has been hit hard by covid.

What do you see as that solution longterm for families trying to raise kids, given the restrictions on education and childcare, spacing, and that sort of thing.

I think there's a whole lot of issues around childcare that are unknown right now because we have each individual district deciding what school looks like next year, uh, that will pose all sorts of childcare issues on families.

And so we need to prop up the nonprofit childcare industry through groups like the y ymca and other groups who provide that service, uh, and also bro business entrepreneurs